Empowerment

Empowerment is a term that is applied to individuals and groups in society and in organizations. Literally, it means the taking of power by individuals or groups; alternatively, it means power being granted to individuals or groups by an authority. Thus, empowerment is the organizational or social practice by someone in a position of power giving some of that power or authority to others. Typically, those receiving power would be a group in a subordinate or disadvantaged position. As an example, a manager might empower employees to take charge of their own quality control process in a production line rather than having a quality control check at the end of the line.

Sometimes, empowerment is viewed as a psychological state of mind for individuals or groups, which allows them to feel a degree of control over their own goals and accomplishments. Empowerment enables people to feel motivated to accomplish goals while feeling a sense of self-determination, self-efficacy, and capability to bring about impacts or changes. In business and other organizational settings, empowerment most frequently means giving employees decisionmaking authority over various aspects of their working situation. In the organizational context, empowerment simply means that power is shared by leaders and managers with employees, which frequently means employees taking responsibility for setting up and managing their own work rather than constantly working under supervision.

Empowerment is also used in society. For example, empowerment has been applied to educators, who empower students to take responsibility for their own learning; to women, empowering or liberating themselves from oppression by various authorities or from men; and to disadvantaged or minority groups in society, which empower themselves in relationship to majority groups. The term has also been applied to organizational teams in the context of their taking responsibility for achieving their own performance goals. Empowerment tends to be applied in situations where a group in some way is, or feels, oppressed by another group that is in authority and has more control over the circumstances faced by the less dominant—less powerful—group. The notion of empowerment in this sense suggests that by becoming more empowered, the oppressed group will take charge of its own fate because it has more self-confidence or self-efficacy and will be motivated to institute changes in its circumstances that will lessen inequities in the system; that is, the group will assume, or be granted, more power. In organizational contexts where various sorts of empowerment programs are implemented, however, it is frequently assumed that it is the managers who “empower” their subordinates by giving them more authority, decisionmaking capacity, or control typically over their work rather than the employees empowering themselves by overtly seeking those changes.